At the CSICon meetings in Las Vegas this November, I gave a half-hour talk on the two aspects of evolutionary biology that have been most deeply misrepresented by ideologues: sex and race. “Progressives” maintain that sex is not binary but a spectrum, and also that “race and ethnicity are social constructs, without scientific or biological […]
If you are not yet a fan of Michael Huemer, you should be. Hyperbole is the worst thing in the universe, but I still affirm the following: Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority is the best book on political philosophy. Huemer’s Ethical Intuitionism is the best book on meta-ethics. Huemer’s Knowledge, Reality, and Value is…
The Centrist reports – In a Q&A interview with Jack Tame, Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer acknowledged Māori have separate rights under Te Tiriti o Waitangi as tangata whenua. When pressed on whether this meant different standards of citizenship, she said, “We have different expectations and different rights, absolutely.”
This new course, to be offered next spring at MIT, was first singled out on The Babbling Beaver site, which calls attention to “fake news” at the university that usually turns out, as in this case, to be real news. The Beaver said this about the course. Feminist theory, disability justice, critical race theory, queer […]
The Australian Green party has proposed cancelling all student debt in Australia, as part of an aim for government to provide “free education for life”. However, free education is not free. In an article in The Conversation earlier this month, Bruce Chapman (Australian National University) makes a case against the claim that cancelling student debt…
My dear friend and colleague Dan Klein wrote this. He loves feedback, so please share your thoughts in the comments. And he’d especially appreciate reactions from friends Shikha Dalmia and Nils Karlson, which I’d definitely be glad to run.P.S. Dan asked me to link to the latest Milei news.I define popuphobe as someone who propagates…
The good news is that the Washington Post, defying the inevitable cries that the paper is “transphobic”, is calling for a “respectful debate on trans women in sports”. This is, of course, because of the increasing number of biological men who identify as women (I prefer that jawbreaker to “trans women” because the latter plays […]
Bob Edlin writes – Associate Justice Minister David Seymour “refused” Morning Report’s invitation to be interviewed on RNZ’s Morning Report, the day after the Treaty Principles Bill he is promoting had passed its first reading in Parliament after “a fiery debate and vote”. No matter. There were plenty of other people all too eager to […]
I’m actually surprised that the article below was published in The Proceedings of the National Academies of Science (PNAS), one of the more high-quality science journals, just a tad below Science and Nature in prestige. It has had a reputation for being “progressive” (e.g., woke), one that I discussed last year when Steve Pinker had […]
With Kemi Badenoch taking over the leadership of Tories in the UK, newspapers have been replete with how this represents a radical turn to the right. Similar headlines appeared when Labour was booted from power in New Zealand. There was a time when I would have thought: “Shame. Why can’t these people not be more…
On November 8, 1939, Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in Munich. The attempt took place in the Bürgerbräukeller, a popular beer hall where he annually commemorated the anniversary of the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, an early failed coup that Hitler had led in an attempt to seize power in Germany. The bomb was […]
The UK Conservative Party has a new leader : . . . On Saturday the Conservatives elected Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch as their leader to propel them to victory at the next general election. . . Born in Wimbledon, southwest London in 1980, after her parents decided she should be born in Britain with the best […]
Tweet… is from page 390 of the 2016 second edition of Thomas Sowell’s excellent volume Wealth, Poverty and Politics (footnotes deleted; original emphases): People who seek to find blame, as distinct from causation, often also seek a localized source of evil to blame. Professor Paul Krugman, for example, refers to slavery as “America’s original sin.”…
The hysterical smears continue. Some on the left live in a fictional world where only organisations they agree with are grass roots organisations, and when an organisation succeeds they disagree with, their minds are so limited they think it must be due to overseas big money. Funnily enough they never scrutinise the organisations they like. […]
Well, I’ll be. The group of interns at the left-wing The Nation have objected to the magazine’s recent endorsement of Kamala Harris and published their gripes. Now why would that happen? We all know that many editors and reporters at the Washington Post objected to the paper’s failure to endorse Kamala Harris, but this kind of […]
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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